Abstract

The goal of this chapter is to describe a novel historical case study in which robustness reasoning could have been used, but was not used by the participant scientists, and in some cases was even openly disavowed by them. The case concerns recent attempts to observationally detect one of the main candidates for cosmological dark matter, called the WIMP. A research group based in Italy, called DAMA, believes it has detected WIMPs using a model-independent research methodology, and it rejects the model-dependent work of other research groups that have failed to detect WIMPs. One of the key points of this case is that the model-dependent groups, despite the fact that they could argue robustly for the no-WIMP result, fail to do so, and some reasons are suggested for this neglect.